Bedlam Burning (40 page)

‘“Sometimes these pieces appear to be offering genuine, or at least convincing, insights into the disturbed human mind, as though they were acts of psychotic ventriloquism; but just as often Mr Collins simply aims for the comedic jugular and provides good, militant, satirical, dirty-minded, intellectual fun. Parts of this book are screamingly funny, all of it is wildly, decadently inventive.

‘“One's first impression might be that these insane voices form a discourse claiming to be independent of dominant ‘sane' ideological practices, and if that were the case one might indeed carp at this overweening ambition. Yet Mr Collins is more ambitious and more slippery still. It dawns on the reader that for all Mr Collins' inventiveness and virtuosity, he can't successfully impersonate so many different voices. We feel he has bitten off more than he can chew. But then, slowly, and what a thrill it is when the realisation comes, we see this is, so to speak, the whole point. One realises that these voices are not intended to be so very different after all. They are in fact all one. They are acts not of ventriloquism but of soliloquy. Mr Collins is, if you will, speaking all the lines, and speaking them to himself. The patients do not exist, the ‘real' Gregory Collins does not exist either, and the fictional author is locked in the asylum of his own head, a sort of literary madhouse. The author is the only patient, the book's only begetter. All we are reading is words, words, words. The book is the diary of a literary madman, and it is magnificent.”'

Bentley folded the pages and placed them on Kincaid's desk. Nobody else moved. I cannot imagine blanker faces than the ones that stared at Bentley and then at each other.

‘I don't know what this means,' said Dr Gutteridge.

He spoke for all of us I think, and yet Bentley's revelation was so different from the one I'd been expecting, that I found myself garrulously on the offensive.

‘Well, it's obviously just nonsense, isn't it?' I said. ‘Are you really trying to say I made it all up, wrote the whole of
Disorders
? That it's a
novel
?'

‘
I
'm not saying that,' said Bentley. ‘But somebody is.'

‘Who wrote this review, anyway?' Alicia asked.

‘Somebody called Michael Smith,' said Bentley. ‘A name I'm not familiar with.'

And then he winked at me again. I started to sweat. Where had this review come from? Why was my name on it? Who'd written it? Why was Bentley doing this? What was he going to get out of it?

‘But it's transparently not true,' I insisted. ‘I didn't make up this clinic. I didn't make up Dr Kincaid. I didn't make up the patients.'

‘No, the reviewer is clearly mistaken there. The charge is more simply, and more seriously, that
Disorders
is not a work of collective pathology, but a work of fiction created by a single hand.'

‘Well, that's obviously not true either, is it?' I said with some passion. ‘Why would I do that? Why would anyone? What would be the point?'

Bentley shrugged extravagantly.

‘Well,' said Dr Driscoll, very slowly and judiciously, ‘one point might be in order to validate an experimental form of therapy, mightn't it? An unscrupulous doctor might, I suppose, employ a professional writer to create an accomplished piece of writing and attribute it to his patients in an attempt to prove that his therapy worked, and that his patients were, so to speak, cured.'

This sounded like Alice in Wonderland stuff to me.

‘I can show you the manuscripts,' I protested, and then I realised that I couldn't. Gregory or the publisher now had them, and if I'd thought about it any further it was obvious that thousands of sheets of typed manuscript actually proved nothing at all.

‘It just didn't happen,' I said. ‘I'll take a lie detector test. Anything.'

The moment I said that I wished I hadn't. God knows how I'd have done on a lie detector. Would it have picked up the fact that I wasn't even who I said I was? Fortunately nobody took me very seriously.

Dr Gutteridge turned to Bentley and said, ‘Are you asking us to believe that the assertions in this review are true?'

‘I'm asking nothing,' Bentley replied.

‘But you're saying that
Disorders
may be, what, a literary hoax?'

Bentley said. ‘I'm merely presenting you with a text. It is no part of my intention to influence your interpretation of that text.'

Kincaid looked paralysed, as though he might be about to give in to some explosive, calamitous impulse, and could only hold himself in check by adopting a sort of catatonia. Alicia tried to come to his aid.

‘Please,' she said. ‘A moment ago we were all perfectly content. We were moving forward. I don't see how one over-ingenious book review can make such a big difference. It's only one person's opinion and we know it's wrong.'

‘I don't know any such thing,' said Dr Driscoll.

‘This really does make a difference,' Dr Gutteridge agreed, and he picked up the photocopy of the review, scouring it for undiscovered clues.

‘We understand that,' said Alicia. ‘We understand your position completely, but still …'

She was trying to sound optimistic, as though the mere fact of understanding their position somehow meant we were all on the same side, but we clearly were not, and the visiting doctors were quite unconvinced.

Dr Gutteridge turned to Bentley and said, ‘Let me ask it more simply. Do
you
think the text of
Disorders
is the work of a single hand?'

Bentley sucked air in between his clenched teeth. He wanted us to know this was difficult stuff. He was not a man for rash decisions, for easy conclusions. He was prudent, thoughtful, authoritative. But at last he had to say, ‘If you really press me, if you really demand an opinion from me, then I think it probably is, yes.'

‘So you think that Mr Collins here wrote every single word of
Disorders
?'

Bentley spread his palms wide and said, ‘He is a very clever, skilful and persuasive young man. And if not him, then who else?'

Doctors Driscoll and Gutteridge nodded gravely. Here was a man they could trust, one of their own, someone whose opinions they had to take seriously, someone they could believe in. I felt almost deranged with anger. What was wrong with these people? How could they think I was the author of this book, I who could barely string two paragraphs together? And regardless of whether I was capable of doing it or not, the simple fact was, I hadn't. And I knew there was no way I could possibly convince them.

My God, Bentley was good. I stared around the blank walls, looking for inspiration, and my eyes fell on the window. I got the fright of my life. As did the trustees.

‘Oh my God, what's that?' said Dr Driscoll.

There was a face at the window, actually a whole body. Charles Manning had found his way up a drainpipe and was now perched on the window ledge, peering in, spying on us. As a covert operation it lacked finesse. The ledge was narrow and he had to press himself against the glass in order not to fall off. Then we saw another detail. His fly was open, his penis was out, and it took on a squashed, doughy appearance as it was flattened against the pane.

‘Oh Jesus,' said Alicia.

Then the office door flew open again and a naked Charity pranced in looking zonked, and did a circle of the room, arms and legs flailing, while singing some song of undifferentiated mysticism.

‘Perhaps we should—' Alicia said, but she was too late. The trustees had already gathered up their belongings and were heading for the door, although Bentley seemed less inclined to run away. He was enjoying this. Nevertheless, we all followed the two doctors as they left the office, Alicia mouthing what she took to be words of reassurance. Kincaid and I were both speechless but we too felt the need to keep up.

Charity danced and twirled ahead of us, like a naked sprite leading us who knew where. When we had passed through the clinic and stepped outside into the open air she left us and ran full tilt towards the dried-up fountain. We didn't go after her since the trustees were rapidly moving in the opposite direction, towards the gate and an immediate exit, but we couldn't help following Charity with our eyes, and the events taking place in and around the fountain were undeniably compelling.

I expect the word orgy is often applied rather casually and inexactly. Let's just say that Charity leapt into the fountain and joined the other nine inmates of the Kincaid Clinic who were already arranged around the statue of the mermaid. They were stripped down and participating in an ornate and spectacular bout of group sex. One small consolation was that at least Gregory Collins wasn't part of the show.

I expect once you've seen one orgy of lunatics you've seen them all. There are only so many things hands and mouths and genitals are capable of, and certainly the patients weren't doing anything beyond the bounds of possibility. They were just doing everything they could. Only three things really stood out for me. One, that an otherwise naked Carla was wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt that looked identical to the one I'd once owned. Two, that Byron, who was only intermittently involving himself in the activities, was taking photographs with what looked very much like my missing camera. And three, that Charles Manning, having come down from the window ledge and removed the rest of his clothes, was masturbating while looking at what was undoubtedly a naked picture of Nicola that had been in my missing collection of photographs.

Need I tell you, nothing about this spectacle was remotely erotic? The patients were whooping it up, making inarticulate noises that in other contexts might have seemed joyous or abandoned, but to me it sounded like the soundtrack of a bad porn film – forced and very
badly acted. There was nothing spontaneous or authentic or even very sexual about it. Obviously they weren't faking as such, since they were really having sex, and yet I felt they were doing it for effect, not for pleasure. And when they started wordlessly signalling to the doctors Bentley, Driscoll and Gutteridge, inviting them to come and join in, the effect was complete.

Our visitors were out of there in seconds flat, and perhaps the orgy would have ended then regardless, but to make absolutely certain, the porters arrived dragging garden hoses behind them and started spraying down the patients with icy water, bringing things to a drenched and inevitable conclusion. Then the porters began to manhandle the patients, brutally strapping them into straitjackets and, in a move I hadn't seen before, putting thick black nylon bags over their heads, and dragging them away to their rooms. You might have thought the patients had numbers on their side and could have put up quite a struggle if they'd wanted to, but they didn't resist much, not even Anders. It was as though they thought this punishment was their due.

Alicia watched sadly but did nothing to intervene and it was left to me to make a feeble, futile protest, to say to Kincaid, ‘And is this part of your precious Kincaidian Therapy too?'

He was not in the mood to be doubted. He gestured to the porters and I was instantly silenced. They grabbed me and did to me what they'd already done to the patients: the straitjacket and the bag over the head. I was outraged. Nothing is more maddening than being treated like a madman. I struggled and shouted, but only in the most ineffectual way. I could hear Alicia asking the porters to be gentle with me, but that had predictably inverse results. They kicked and punched me a little, and then dragged me back to my writer's hut, where they abandoned me and where I remained for some considerable time.

A man can entertain some strange thoughts while he's lying on the floor of his hut, bound in a straitjacket with a black nylon bag tied over his head, and the particularly strange thought I came to entertain was that I finally knew what was going on. Something clicked and I was certain I knew what Kincaid and the patients were up to. Consequently I felt myself seething with indignation and righteous anger, desperate to communicate this precious truth that I'd worked out.

My opportunities for communication were strictly limited, however. At first there had been bangs and crashes outside the hut, shouting, some laughter, some barked orders from Kincaid, the sound of glass breaking, a noise that could have been someone being pummelled with a truncheon. And then it had all gone perfectly quiet, though that in itself was no source of comfort. I wondered what kind of coshes, chemical or otherwise, what kind of shock treatments, what ‘experimental techniques', Kincaid and the porters might be performing out there. And where was Alicia in all this?

Time passed painfully. I tried to breathe slowly and regularly, tried not to fret too much about the cramps developing in my arms and shoulders. Finally, hours later, I heard footsteps coming into the hut, just one person, not the two porters as I feared, and it sounded like a woman's tread. Then a pair of hands was on me, pulling the bag from over my head. It was Alicia, and I was exquisitely relieved. I thought everything was going to be all right now.

I was expecting a great flood of light when the bag came off but it was night, the hut was in darkness and Alicia was working by the glow of a small pencil torch. It seemed a little melodramatic but perhaps it was necessary.

‘I'm really sorry about this,' Alicia said. ‘It's all my fault. I should probably never have brought you here.'

It was tempting to agree with her, but I said, ‘I wouldn't have missed it for the world.'

‘You're an interesting case,' she said.

‘More than you might imagine.' And then with the flawless confidence that the hero always displays, I said, ‘Listen, I can explain everything.'

‘You can?' said Alicia, and I thought she sounded impressed. ‘What do you mean by everything?'

She was right to make me define my terms. There was a certain amount I was still going to leave unexplained, like who I was for instance, but I said, ‘For a start I know why the patients suddenly went crazy like that.'